1. Field of Invention
This invention relates to computer systems and in particular to an intelligent means of acquiring, storing and sharing information.
2. Description of Prior Art
Servers on the Internet contain vast quantities of information and are distributed around the globe. However, the vast majority of information is of no use to a particular person. Finding information of use requires considerable knowledge as well as time and money. Mosaic offers a graphical user interface to the Internet making access easier. Yet there are tens of thousands of servers to choose from and a large quantity of information to sift through once on an individual server. Furthermore, the server is usually slow due to the number of persons logged onto it and by the network traffic to communicate with it.
There are librarian servers on the Internet which scan thousands of servers and catalogue the files on the servers. However, these librarian servers are slow due to the magnitude of the search and the large number of requesters. Further, one may find hundreds of potential files on a given topic; accessing and reading the files to find useful ones takes and wastes considerable time. These servers may cover some topics to a considerable degree and others sparsely.
Services such as CompuServe and America Online alleviate congestion problems to a considerable degree by charging money. However, since the on-line service is charging per minute, one may not have the time to sift through on-line services and bulletin boards to find what one is looking for. The on-line service reduces the vast quantities of useless information on the Internet by offering a smaller set of services and bulletin boards found to be of interest to most people. However, the list of services is still very large and one is not confident which if any will be of interest. Furthermore, excellent information may be available on the Internet or elsewhere which the particular on-line service does not offer.
Bulletin boards may haphazardly provide specific information of interest. However, one must sift through answers which may or may not be of interest. Furthermore, one must find the bulletin board of interest; on the Internet there are a vast number which may or may not suit a person.
Expert systems are available which sift through information by use of algorithms, driven by rules and stored in a knowledge base. However, expert systems are expensive and time consuming to produce and maintain. It would be impossible to cover the vast and evolving information located on the Internet. Furthermore, the processing time required to run the expert systems would reduce the response time of these already slow servers considerably.
Another option is an heuristic database weighted by the usefulness response of clients. Patent number 5301314 to Gifford (1991) describes this method. The method consists of placing information which was determined useful within a category higher on the tree of offered information within the category. This method falls short in several ways. First, one must sift through the categories. Second, once in the category, one must sift through excellent answers until one finds the excellent answer which matches the question; the answer may not even be on the database or may be located in a different category. Third, people have differing interests even when the subject of a search is narrowly defined. For this reason the assumption made by prior art search engines that everyone is interested in the documents viewed by the majority often results in search results that are of little interest or value to the person conducting the search--therefore. In a category of movies, as an example, an excellent choice for an English Professor may be a poor choice to an engineer. Forth, what if one is not sure what categories may be of interest. There are millions on the Internet and thousands in subscriber services which may or may not suit a given person.
Another option is to provide trained personnel to search for information. This solution is expensive. Further, what is a good information to the personnel may not be to the person requesting the information. If the question is highly specialized in a given field, the personnel may not have the technical knowledge to find the appropriate information. Finally, searching even by a trained person, takes a considerable amount of time.
An intelligent computer based method to share information is needed which will reduce traffic on a networked system of computers and processing load on server machines. This method should offer the best information for a particular persons needs, whether that information is located locally on the server, is located on the Internet or is chosen from a set of responses on a bulletin board.